Coaching practices for Leader Self Care

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Leader Self Care, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I run myself into the ground taking care of everyone else and I’m always the last person on my own list
• My default setting is to evaluate myself constantly
• I bend over backwards to be fair to everyone else and then quietly leave myself out of the equation entirely
• People talk about a calm, centered place inside, and I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever been there
• I’ll bend over backwards for everyone else, but the idea of being that gentle with myself feels selfish

Practices that may help

1. Fierce provision: identify and meet your own needs
   Ask yourself what you need right now and take action to supply it — without waiting to be asked.
   Fierce Self-Compassion, Made Practical
2. Practice daily self-transcendence
   Each day, do at least one thing whose value is entirely independent of how you felt, performed, or appeared while doing it.
   Logotherapy: Dereflection
3. Be Fair: include yourself in the fairness you extend to others
   Apply the same standards of fairness to yourself that you would to someone you respect.
   FAST: DBT’s Skill for Maintaining Self-Respect in Relationships
4. Recognize the qualities of Self when they are present
   Learn to identify when you are in Self — calm, curious, compassionate — so you can notice when you are not.
   IFS Self Energy, Made Practical
5. Include acts of kindness toward yourself
   The kindness architecture that builds well-being includes self-directed kindness — not just other-directed.
   Acts of Kindness, Made Practical
6. Cultivate Self through directed inner compassion
   Practice sending compassion inward — toward the parts that are suffering — to build the Self-energy those parts need.
   IFS Self Energy, Made Practical
7. Self-Compassion, Made Practical
   Kristin Neff defines self-compassion as treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a struggling friend, built from three parts: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Unlike self-esteem, it does not depend on success or comparison — and it has a genuinely strong research base, with controlled trials linking it to lower anxiety, depression, and self-criticism.
8. Self-Soothing, Made Practical
   Self-soothing is the skill of comforting and calming yourself during distress — through sensory input, self-compassionate internal dialogue, physical regulation, and deliberate attention management. It draws on well-established mechanisms: bottom-up sensory regulation, vagal activation, and self-compassion. Individual soothing techniques vary in evidence; the general category of self-regulation through internal resources is well grounded in both DBT and attachment research.
9. Self-compassion through the distancing lens
   Combine third-person perspective with self-compassionate framing to avoid both self-attack and self-indulgence.
   Self-Distancing Journaling
10. N — Nurture with self-compassion
    Offer the part that is suffering what it most needs — care, acknowledgment, reassurance — as you would a dear friend.
    RAIN Meditation: Tara Brach’s Four-Step Practice

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.